By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO–Israel is celebrating its 63rd Day of Independence according to the Hebrew calendar; the secular date of the UN-sanctioned declaration of a Jewish state was May 14, 1948. Just three years after the death camps of Europe were liberated by the Allies, Israel became—and remains—the greatest response to genocide in modern history.
Sometimes one wonders what the media, the pundits, the leftists, the Presbyterians, and most of Europe would all do if they did have not Israel and the Jews to examine and excoriate. Certainly it’s a collective straight line away from their own inexhaustible layers of racial hypocrisies, inquisitions, crusades, slave-trading, and discarding-all-principles-for-oil that comes with their parlor anti-Semitism.
Since BP (then the Anglo-Persian Oil Company) first raped that land, now called Iran, for oil in 1908, there has been a love-hate liaison with the Arabs that has manipulated the American consumer, cost the lives of thousands of American soldiers in several business war adventures [Kuwait-Iraq-Saudi Arabia], while conveniently stonewalling our finest ally in the region, Israel, as the scapegoat for any and troubles.
Last year’s gushing of oil into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig, and the attendant destruction now wrought upon the waters, coast, wildlife, environment—not to mention the hard-working people, economy, and the future of a significant portion of the United States—remains a toxic allegory of this entire duplicity.
Since last May 14, millions of words of analysis and somber reflection, if not steaming chastisement, filled the pages and testimonies of the world’s press and legislative records about Israel’s bungled incident with the cynically presented “peace” flotilla. Not a lot of parallel consideration was given to Egypt’s quiet cooperation with Israel’s arms blockade of the Hamas-locked Gaza, or to the fact that Turkey’s sudden and overwrought concern for the Palestinians does not seem to extend to their refugee camps in Lebanon, or to the fact that Jordan massacred manifold times more Palestinians in 1970 deliberately than Israel ever has in defense of its borders, or that the United Kingdom (whose academic centers practically offer anti-Semitism as a curriculum item) invented white colonialism.
Moreover, while it was invigorating that South Africa hosted the World Cup, it is also beyond any realm of pretense for that nation to join in the knee-jerk labeling of Israel as an “apartheid” state. To this day, and over the course of 63 very hard years, Israel remains the only party in the conflict to have repeatedly returned land to the Arabs in exchange for the elusive peace Israel for which Israel yearns. And now the “moderate” Fatah is supposedly reconciling with Hamas—a terror syndicate that swears Israel’s extermination and is on the terror-organization list of the United States and the European Union. Some peace partner!
The Israeli people, feisty, democratic, weary, filled with self-awareness, though unwilling to ever give up their remarkable country, are undergoing a thorough and painful period of introspection in the wake of recent events and the larger question of this 44-year occupation of territory that followed the 1967 war forced upon them. Jews all over the world join with them in contemplation and reflection, hope and prayer.
We are not doing it because the chorus of anti-Semitism is getting louder and uglier. We are not going to suddenly capitulate on anything, however. For us, world history has always been an oil leak, from betrayal to BP. So you see, it’s just that we are not going to be marched to the gas chambers ever again.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com